1) Still haven't logged your classroom visits? Don't panic… you can still log them now at the portal: http://www.letstalkscience.ca/login/. National LTS sends a volunteer certificate to all volunteers who have logged visits so please log them ASAP!! 2) Still have supplies and/or receipts from your classroom visits? Please bring them all to us! Office hours are no longer in effect in the summer, so please arrange a time with one of the coordinators (Lars/Mike for on campus appointments, Agatha/Sam for appointments off campus). 3) Lastly, if you have any photos with consent from the kids please send them our way too!! ___________________________________________________ UBC Let's Talk Science Partnership Program E-Newsletter Volume 11, Issue 12 (last issue in the 2007-2008 year) August 2008 ______________________________________________________ In this issue: Volunteers Needed - Musqueam (throughout August and September) - Rising Stars of Research (August 21 & 22) - Graduate Student Orientation (August 28) - Celebrate Learning Week Lab Day & Carl Wieman Talk (October 3) - Celebrate Learning Week Climate Change Symposium (~October 3) Upcoming Events & Opportunities - Rural Visit to Tofino (August 21-22) - Train future Problem Based Learning tutors (August 19 & 21) - Dr. Carl Wieman talk (October 3) Volunteer appreciation - All Star Volunteers - Year-end evaluation draw winner Recently completed events - MS Infinity (July 21st & 28th) - CEDAR Summer Camp (July 21st & 23rd, 31st, August 1st) - Little Mountain Campus Academy (July 28th & August 1st) - Lynn Canyon Ecology Centre / LTS Summer Engineering Camp (July 24th - August 28th) - UBC Community Science Days (July 24th) - Musqueam Aboriginal Summer Camp (July) - Genome BC DNA Extraction for Summer School (August 5th) - Classroom visits LTS in the Media - Recent LTS features - Graduate Magazine, Science Creative Quarterly – your chance to submit! Office Hours Science Joke of the Month ***************************************** === Volunteers Needed === ++ Musqueam Summer Camps Let's Talk Science has been helping with this camp for several weeks now, but more helpers are welcome. Thus far, we've enlightened the campers with some chemistry, physics and geology!! If you are curious to know more, feel free to let Mike know at mike_carnate@hotmail.com. The camps run every Tuesday at 10:00am for about an hour. Come and join fun! ++ Rising Stars of Research (August 21 & 22) This is a unique opportunity to participate in a new, national, undergraduate science research poster competition hosted by UBC, which runs from August 21 - 23, 2008. http://www.risingstars.ubc.ca/ Opportunities for you: Graduate students from a variety of fields (apart from engineering, sorry) are required for the following positions: 1) At the reception on Thursday August 21st (Barber Learning Centre, 6 pm): Participate as a facilitator of very informal networking sessions with undergraduates (food & bevies included!). 2) At the poster session on Friday August 22nd (Life Sciences Centre, 11am - 1pm): Act as an adjudicator. Grads are also encouraged to recruit a PI/prof from their field to judge with them (in the end, there will be adjudicator pairs composed of graduate students and profs) (food & bevies included!). If you are interested in any of these opportunities, email us back with the following information: Your name Your department/program/area of study Which opportunities you are interested in ++ Graduate Student Orientation (August 28) On Thursday August 28, LTS will have a booth at the new students orientation (hosted by Grad Studies) to tell new grad students about who we are/what we do, and we are looking for 1-2 volunteers to join us in man-ing (or woman-ing) the booth! Last year, this event was very successful and we also received a free hamburger lunch, and hopefully this year will be no different. Email us if you want to help us out at the booth, thanks! ++ Celebrate Learning Week Lab Day & Wieman Talk (October 3rd) This year marks the first year of the Celebrate Learning Week at UBC (Sept 29th – Oct 3rd), a week to showcase all of the amazing extracurricular opportunities at UBC in an effort to help first-year students transition into university. The UBC Let's Talk Science Partnership Program will be running a lab event and scavenger hunt the morning of October 3rd. Approximately 20 - 30 elementary school students (likely grade 7s) will first participate in a DNA extraction activity (likely followed by another lab experiment - TBA) at a UBC laboratory, and then will take part in a scavenger hunt that ends at the UBC Bookstore. The students will then be escorted to Dr. Carl Wieman's talk. The Wieman event is at 12:30 and a boxed lunch will be served. It will be in the Curtis Building (law) room 101. Let us know if you would like to attend this talk, independent of the lab day, and we can reserve seats for you. If you are interested in participating in the lab day and/or attending the Carl Wieman talk please contact Chelsea at chelseawoo@gmail.com. Chelsea is the CLW Project Leader for LTS. ++ Celebrate Learning Week Climate Change Symposium (~October 3) Celebrate Learning Week is also featuring a climate change symposium. This is an excellent opportunity to dapple in something you are passionate about. Participate in one or a variety of activities including: hands on activities, a panel discussion, or a research talk. Focus of the symposium involves the following main ideas: • Scientific Foundations of Knowledge on Climate Change (the most cutting edge stuff here) • Accelerating Solutions • UBC Campus as a Living Lab for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation • Moving from Science to Policy E-mail Chelsea at chelseawoo@gmail.com if interested or for more info!! **************************************************** === Upcoming Events and Opportunities === ++ Rural Visit to Tofino (August 21-22) We already have a couple of volunteers going on this visit, to present chemistry and CSI activities to summer campers. More opportunities like this will pop up in the next few months though so e-mail Lisa at lts.rsvp@gmail.com to get on her rural visits email list… ++ Train future Problem Based Learning tutors (August 19 & 21) The Faculty of Medicine is hiring some graduate students to help train incoming Problem Based Learning tutors for their Undergrad Medicine Program… They need 5-6 grad students who would be able to participate in the workshop – each would be paid $100 and it involves attending two morning sessions (8:00-12:00 approximately) on Tuesday Aug 19 and Thursday Aug 21. They go through a PBL case and on Tuesday they will generate what we call "learning issues" which they will need to research before Thursday morning. It is a really interesting experience, and what grad doesn't need money?? Contact Nora Houlahan at nora.houlahan@ubc.ca to sign up. ++ Dr. Carl Wieman talk (October 3) Want to hear nobel laureate Dr. Carl Wieman give a talk during UBC's Celebrate Learning Week AND get a lunch out of it? Go to 'Celebrate Learning Week Lab Day and Wieman Talk' above for details! NOTE: email us to reserve at seat at the talk! ____________________________________________________ === Volunteer appreciation === ++ All Star Volunteers Every summer we honour all volunteers who have participated in at least 6 activities and recognize them as our All Star Volunteers! Each All Star will receive a $20 gift card courtesy of the UBC Bookstore. This year's All Stars are: Minnie Dai, Rena Tabata, Erin Kennah, Heather Spohr, Nadia Pietravalle, Lindsay Jibb, Brandon Ash, Vicki Cheng, Richard Wong, Vicky Mok, Andrew Lee, Anne Bjorkman, Nelly Amenyogbe, Philip Edgcumbe, Po-Yan Cheng, Theresa Liao, Winnie Tam, Crispin Jordan, Sherie Duncan, and Jennifer Whelan. We will be in contact with you shortly to deliver the gift cards. Enjoy! ++ Year-end evaluation draw winner Thank-you to everyone who submitted a year-end evaluation form! As promised, one lucky volunteer will earn a $50 UBC Bookstore gift card, and the winner is (…drum roll…) - Andrew Lee - Congratulations Andrew, happy shopping at the Bookstore! ____________________________________________________ === Recently Completed Activities === ++ MS Infinity DNA Extraction workshop Let's Talk Science and MS Infinity teamed up again this year to deliver another exciting workshop. The DNA Extraction workshop ran on two separate days at the YMCA downtown, and we reached over 30 energetic kids. Special thanks to Monique Desroches, Christine Anderson, Christine Olsen, and the staff at the YMCA. ++ CEDAR Summer Camp In the tradition of providing science and engineering programming to the CEDAR camp over the past years, we co-hosted four events with UBC CEDAR this summer. July 21st: Danielle Bourque, Ramandeep Gill, Melanie Gendre and Lars Rose provided a DNA activity July 23rd: Erin Kennah coordinated this day, and got help from Sina Shahandeh to provide Fisheries and Nutrition activities. July 31st: Ryan Wicks provided a robot race audition with robots designed by and built through the engineering physics program over the summer. August 1st: The Community Day was coordinated by Heidrun Spohr, and participants, and their parents enjoyed a full day of rockets firing, dry ice mist, robot head races and fresh fisheries food at the UBC longhouse. Thank-you volunteers for your great help!! ++ Little Mountain Campus Academy (July 28th and August 1st) This year, we brought science activities to 20 kids aged 10-14 were in this camp. On July 28, Derek van Pel and Jesse Popov were on hand to help out: Derek gave a crowded but smooth lab tour, Jesse followed with Fun with Dry Ice, which was then succeeded by the always-popular kiwi DNA extraction. We were back on August 1, where Paeta Lehn and Nelson Yang led 3 more activities: Biodiversity (where the kids used light microscopes to check out scales on their fingers as well as microorganisms from a Botanical Garden pond), a Digestive system demo, and the explosive Mentos-Pop show. Thanks to Derek, Jesse, Paeta, and Nelson for their great work! ++ Lynn Canyon Ecology Centre / LTS Summer Engineering Camp (July 24th and August 28th) For the first time this year, we created engineering activities for the Lynn Canyon Ecology Centre. The theme is an Engineering Challenge in the Lynn Canyon in North Vancouver. This event was led by former UBC LTS coordinator Tricia Edgar, as well as Richard Wong, and Phil Tomlinson. ++ UBC Community Science Days We co-hosted the alternative energy sessions at the Old Barn community Centre (6308 Thunderbird Boulevard) on July 24th. The local UBC community was informed about science outreach and sustainable campus development. At the end, everyone had the chance to drive around in a real fuel cell car provided by Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Canada and the National Research Council. ++ Musqueam Aboriginal Summer Camp For this camp, Mike has been leading fun activities in chemistry, physics and geology!! This camp is still ungoing; if you are curious to know more, email Mike at mike_carnate@hotmail.com. ++ Genome BC DNA activities (August 5th) Andrew Lee and Vicki Cheng did two DNA Extraction classroom visits for high school science summer school classes. Thank you Andrew and Vicki for signing up at the last minute and doing some fun, hands-on activities for the summer school students! ++ Classroom visits No new classroom visits took place in July (for good reasons…) but quite a few previously unreported visits have surfaced: Jesse Popov did a crossword activity and then a quiz game about electricity. Lindsay Jibb and Brandon Ash went to one of their classes 3 times to talk about how to do good science projects. They then tackled another class to delivere a lesson on friction using pulleys. Marie-France Lise did 3 visits that focused on sound and light hands-on activities. Maisam Makarem went to her class to demonstrating how air pollution can occur and discussed how some of the gases that get produced can worsen our environment. Chris Cochrane did some experiments with dry ice, talked about phases of matter, and had the kids build terrariums with different land and atmospheric features and record temperatures. Henny Yeung and Crispin Jordan did 3 ecology/biology-themed visits to their class. Kelley Bromley-Brits did extracted DNA (using wheat germ!) with her class as well as an Acid/Base/pH activity. Sabrina Lorenz used 2L pop bottles to perfection by having tornado as well as rain/condensation competitions. Cecilia Huang took her two classes to the park for a field trip where they observed the habitat of animals (primarily the Canada Geese) and talked about becoming more aware about conserving these natural habitats within our community. Jasna Jankovic did an energy presentation to her students. Are you not on? Log your activity on http://www.letstalkscience.ca/login. ___________________________________________________ === LTS in the Media === Recent LTS features We got featured as science contributors in TREK21 due to the full day programming we provided for the UBC Alumni Association: http://ubclts.com/files/TREKSummer2008-Alumni%20Weekend.pdf (UBC Alumni Association | Trek 21 | Vol63 No.2 | 2008 Summer) Also, we made it to UBC Ingenuity: http://ubclts.com/files/ingenuity_2008_spring_summer_s.pdf (Erin Rose Handy and Lars Rose | Ingenuity 3429 | April 23 2008 | pp.05, 12 & backside) Graduate Magazine, Science Creative Quarterly – your chance to submit! Please email us (lts@ubclts.com, with the Subject "LTS volunteer Submission to SCQ / GradMag") if you are interested in writing for the back-up-and-running GSS Graduate Magazine, or the UBC Science Creative Quarterly (a highly popular site!). Ideas could range from your own research, to the most fun science outreach experience you ever did (with LTS or on your own), to some off-world topic you always wanted to write about. For other types of media coverage, please check out our LTS Media page: http://ubclts.com/ltsmedia ____________________________________________________ === Office Hours === Office hours will no longer be "regular" until September. Office hours will be by appointment, so in you plan on coming by the office please arrange it with Mike (mike_carnate@hotmail.com). _____________________________________________________ === Science Joke of the Month === See attached *gif image. =) -- Lars Rose, Sam Lee, Agatha Jassem, Mike Carnaté & Tamryn Loo Coordinators, UBC Let's Talk Science Partnership Program University of British Columbia 2357B-1874 East Mall (Brock Hall Annex) Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1 Phone: (604) 822-9166 Fax: (604) 822-5945 Email: LTS (at) ubclts.com Web: http://www.ubclts.com Utube: www.youtube.com/user/UBCLTScom